The Great Temptation: Georg Nees and the Plotter That Drew Art
A Siemens mathematician, a plotter bought for technical drawings and a programming error: how Georg Nees helped open the first shows of computer art in 1965.
In 1963, Georg Nees, a mathematician at the Siemens Schuckertwerke in Erlangen, helped the company's data centre buy a flatbed plotter, the Zuse Graphomat Z64 designed by Konrad Zuse. It was meant for technical drawings. Nees later described what happened next: "There it was, the great temptation for me, for once not to represent something technical with this machine but rather something 'useless': geometrical patterns."
He gave in. Writing his own graphics libraries in ALGOL to drive the plotter and generate random numbers, he made drawings that, in February 1965, were shown as works of art in an exhibition titled computer graphik at the Study Gallery of the Technische Hochschule Stuttgart, where he was studying philosophy under Max Bense. It is counted among the first exhibitions of graphics made with a digital computer.
One of the best stories from those years is an accident. In 1965 Nees ran a programme that drew a single continuous path of circle arcs, each with a random length and radius. The result, Kreisbogengewirre, or Arc Confusion, came out denser than planned. As Frieder Nake explained, the picture in its present form is due to a fairly serious programming error: it was designed to be less complex, and it had to be stopped by hand.
Nees went on to make Schotter (Gravel) in 1968, a grid of squares that slides from order into disorder and now belongs to the V&A in London. He wrote a doctoral thesis, Generative Computergraphik, in 1969, and in 2026, the year he would have turned 100, Heike Werner Gallery in Munich marked the centenary with Georg NEES 100.
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